Anatomy of an ad-hominem attack

When people find it difficult to debate specific aspects of a rational argument that you're making, they can sometimes resort to using ad-hominem attacks. Here's a beautiful example of one that was sparked by my article on Web vs. Native at Smashing Magazine.

An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it. Ad hominem reasoning is normally described as a logical fallacy, more precisely an informal fallacy and an irrelevance. Abusive ad hominem (also called personal abuse or personal attacks) usually involves insulting or belittling one's opponent in order to attack his claim or invalidate his argument. (Wikipedia)

By referring to "the useless garbage" I tweet "and ship", Brian is attempting to negate the validity of what I wrote in the article by attacking me personally. This is doubly sad since the article in question aims to take a reasoned overview of the technologies and platforms available to us as designers and developers when making decisions that will impact the user experience of the products that we make. His tweets do not address any of the points in the article and instead focus on me, the author.

Syd Lawrence, a developer I met at a hack day in Cannes, chimes in with a reply to Brian:

It is also puzzling that Syd states that I "claim to make stuff" as he took part in the same hack day I did in Cannes in March and saw me make Grab Magic (source code) using a combination Processing, Web Sockets, and Objective-C/Cocoa Touch. In fact, I'd even asked Syd to be on my team and he had even helped me to get started on the project by giving me pointers to the web socket libraries he'd used and to his own open-source Kinect hacks (for which I was, and still am, very grateful). Grab Magic went on to win the hack day and I recently presented it at the TED@London auditions for TED Global 2013.

Ah, but I digress… See what I did there? I was defending myself.

Of course, such ad-hominem attacks are made precisely in hopes that you will end up having to defend yourself (as illustrated above) instead of debating a particular issue and thus to draw the topic of discussion even further away from the original argument.

Ad-hominem attacks are not constructive in the least and they detract from the actual issues we're trying to debate in a civilised manner. Unfortunately, they also constitute a form of online bullying that says "if you challenge something we are involved in on valid technical grounds or based on design considerations, we will attack your character". Personally, I have a thick skin. I don't enjoy these sorts of tussles but neither do they have the intended affect on me of shutting me up (quite the contrary, apparently). However, not everyone is as thick skinned and nor should everyone have to be in order to enjoy the right to rationally and civilly debate matters of design or development.

So, Brian and Syd, if you have issues with my Web vs. Native article on Smashing Magazine, please address those issues directly. Maybe make a blog post that states your objections. Add to the conversation constructively and everyone will benefit from the discussion.

Amy StephenExcellent. Glad to hear you have thick skin, it's worth pointing out that what these types of situations do is silence those who we'd sure like to encourage to...Excellent. Glad to hear you have thick skin, it's worth pointing out that what these types of situations do is silence those who we'd sure like to encourage to participate. This type of rude behavior is not constructive and it is very difficult to address without encouraging more. It is, as you say, bullying, and there is far too much of it online. We need a community-driven "web cops" group who will come in when these situations arise and deal. more2012-06-19T14:26:26.658Z